The Mythical Man-Month

gga

Everyone knows this book; everyone knows the core points and Brooks’
recommendations and laws, even if not everyone has read it. This is
one of the few true classics of computing. I’m not going to waste
anyone’s time repeating those assertions.

The Mythical Man-Month is now, unfortunately, hilariously
anachronistic. And, the anachronisms are starting to damage the book:
the core ideas are getting buried beneath 40 years of development
technology advances. Engineers each get their own computer (or even
two!) now, we don’t need to share debugging time
anymore. Surprisingly, I’m a little hesitant to recommend this book
now. Beneath the anachronisms there is plenty of good advice: the
point he tries to make about planning your debugging time and keeping
track of what happened afterwards still applies, for example. But, you
have to be prepared to dig, to see through all that to what he’s
really trying to say. If you do choose to read, skim the original
parts and dwell more on his 20th anniversary additions:

There are two things I will say:

‘Build one to throw away’ is wrong. Brooks comes out very clearly
against that, even though he originally popularised it. Don’t do it,
plan to prototype and grow organically. This suits me just fine
and leads to:

Brooks is the original agilist. Time and time again the things he
values are competent, pro-active people and high-visibility,
high-efficiency, fast-turnaround development processes. The corner
stones for the agile family of methodologies.